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Germany

January 28, 2008 -- DIE LINKE
(The Left) emerged successful from regional elections on Sunday, January 27, 2008, in the German federal states of Hesse and Lower Saxony. After the state
of Bremen, where the party in May 2007 for the first time entered a West German federal state parliament, DIE LINKE will have parliamentarians in two further
West German states.

In Lower Saxony (capital: Hannover), the party got 7.1% of
the vote, while in Hesse (capital: Wiesbaden) it just stepped over the 5%
threshold with 5.1%. In both counties, the big parties had tried to prevent
DIE LINKE entering parliament with anti-communist campaigning.

Not long before the European elections, in which the social democratic vote collapsed, two of the most authoritative social democratic leaders, Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder, published a letter in which they formulated the principles of the so-called "new centre" (neue Mitte). These principles could be summed up as arguing that the traditional ideas of social democracy (redistribution, a mixed economy and state regulation in the spirit of Keynes) needed to be replaced by new approaches in the spirit of neo-liberalism.

True, the authors of the letter took their distance from neo-liberalism itself, stating that they did not share its illusions that all problems could be solved through market methods. At the same time, they proposed to solve the problems of world trade by liberalising it further. Instead of solidarity, they called for increased competition, and instead of job creation, for preparing young people better for life under the conditions of a constantly changing market conjuncture.

Winfried Wolf is a writer living in Berlin who for many years was an
activist in the Trotskyist Fourth International. He was an independent
member of the German parliament on the Party of Democratic Socialism list
from 1997 to 2002. This article first appeared in Labour Focus on Eastern
Europe.